Providing consumers with access to online or other electronic resources may impact a resource provider's infrastructure. When multiple resources are requested and provided to multiple consumers, the weights or costs associated with the requests add up, and can thus lead to a decrease in overall system performance. For example, in the context of a network-based application platform such as a publishing platform or a marketplace platform, a resource consumer may submit a query request that requires a number of resources, such as some processing by a database server. The processing by the database server needed by the query may have certain associated costs that may be measured, for example, by the amount of time (e.g., processing time), memory, bandwidth, storage, or other computing resources. When a number of query requests and other requests require processing from the database server (e.g., record creation requests, record modification requests, record deletion requests, database management requests, etc.), the costs for a database server may approach or even exceed the database server's limits on its capabilities. Furthermore, responding to certain requests may impose different burdens on varying resources, and differing degrees of burden on the infrastructure than responding to other requests (e.g., querying a database may require substantially more processing than a webpage request). Overuse or abuse by a resource consumer may ultimately degrade the infrastructure's ability to serve other resource consumers.